Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Maintenance & Servicing Weding and Rust Removal

Well yes, you certainly paid attention all the time ! We flew in some really awful weather with dire visibility quite often. Funny how you get good at the job though. We could talk to ATC, listen to radio 4 and do the job which was basically following buried pipeline which you couldn't see, so we were navigating using OS maps for the line which was a metre wide and flying maps for the flying aspect and talking to each other both about the work and personal items. The winter was a pain though, as we needed all the daylight hours to carry out the survey work, So we would get airborne while it was still dark, usually from the back of a hotel or a farm B+B and position to our start point. In the middle of the day we would stop for a rotors turning refuel, And usually stick the fuel in ourselves, another 100 gallons of avtur for the next 3.5 hrs flying. We had range extenders fitted to increase the fuel capacity! Mainly Jet Ranger, squirrel and some Hughes 500 C,D and E Then home to our overnight and off again in the morning. It was a pain though as you could only have a mouthful of tea at breakfast as you didn't get out all day and have you ever tried having a pee under the rotor wash of a helicopter.....don't try it! Just for information, there are six permanent aircraft flying the gas lines in the uk and every piece of high pressure line is inspected every 2 weeks.
It all seems like a dream now and the time has condensed into what feels like a fortnight, maybe even a long weekend and it was in fact 8,500 flying hours and all hands on! I n the end I just got sick of not going home, in the winter often for weeks on end then the kids came along and I knew I had to change my life totally! But that's for another day!

You remind me of the time I took a Cessna out of Cape Town International. The large commercial jet ahead of me (note:someway ahead) was sent his take off instructions. They were incorrectly read back, so the tower repeated them. They came back incorrectly again. After the third repeat the tower virtually said go and clear our airspace. Whether the aircraft reached its destination we'll never know.

Yes learned my lesson about pre-flight checks after taking off from home base (Jersey) single engine Gruman straight out of 100 hr service trusting that the engineers had done their job and 40 miles out en-route to SND losing one cylinder, made land and on inspection found one spark lead off and all the other loose. Somebody was looking after me.

You were very lucky Keith. Had something similar climbing out of Bournemouth a few days before Christmas nearly 30 years ago en-route to Brussels and in IMC. Engine started missing badly, called PAN PAN and was vectored back to BMH ILS. After safe landing with fire engines behind, taxied over to my maintenance guys who found two faulty plugs on one cylinder! Turns out the top one had lost electrode which had dropped onto plug below. Was told I was lucky that my Piper Arrow had a six cylinder Continental as with a four in same situation would have been lucky to maintain height.

Guardian angels Richard,